B.C. Conservatives criticize Alberta-Ottawa pipeline plan through southern route

OTTAWA — The recently unveiled southern route for a proposed new West Coast oil pipeline is facing criticism from a surprising corner: provincial Conservatives in B.C.

They say that the southerly route, which cuts through B.C.’s highly fertile Fraser Valley, places an unnecessary strain on already dwindling prime farmland in the area.

The planned route, announced earlier this month by the federal and Alberta governments, will run some 1,200 kilometres from Bruderheim, Alta. southwest to Roberts Bank in Delta, B.C. The proposal was selected over an option to the B.C. north coast that was opposed by B.C. Premier David Eby.

B.C. Conservative agriculture critic Ian Paton says he’s especially concerned as the party’s MLA for Delta South, the riding where the proposed pipeline would end.

Paton said the pipeline would deal yet another blow to his community’s farmers, who’ve already lost plenty of farmland during the construction of multiple major transportation and resource projects.

“Over the years, ever since I was a kid, Delta farmland has been split up by this project or the other,” said Paton. “Do we need one more huge interruption going through our farmland in Delta?”

He pointed to a provincial highway project that bisected Delta farms to give drivers a quick route to the U.S., a 70-kilometre rail corridor connecting Roberts Bank to the broader North American rail network, the construction of a massive coal export facility at Roberts Bank and the stringing of towering high-voltage power lines in the community, among other projects.

B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who represented part of Delta as a Conservative MP between 2011 and 2015, has also criticized the selection of the southern route, blaming Eby for blocking the northern route, which would have been shorter and closer to Asian export markets. The north option faced a moratorium on oil tanker traffic in the area imposed in 2019 by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, under pressure from environmental and First Nations activists who claimed it was ecologically unsafe. Carney initially indicated he might relax the moratorium, but ultimately agreed to keep it as part of a large infrastructure-spending deal with Eby in exchange for the premier promising not to oppose a new southern pipeline.

“(Eby is) actively forcing our energy sector into longer, costlier southern routes that will cut through vital farmland just to satisfy a room full of activists,” Findlay wrote last week in a social media post.

Delta, a city of just over 100,000 residents that sits in the southwest corner of the Fraser Valley, has historically been an agricultural powerhouse. The community sits on roughly a quarter of Metro Vancouver’s agricultural land base and produces almost 80 per cent of its cereal crops.

Paton said that, while he’s not necessarily anti-development, he’s also concerned by the rate at which local farmland is dwindling.

“The reason we’re called ‘Delta’ is because we’re on a flood plain of, like, million-year-old deposits … It’s some of the most beautiful, nutrient-rich soil in existence,” said Paton.

“Once that prime farmland is gone, it’s gone forever.”

The surrounding Fraser Valley, including several communities along the proposed pipeline’s route, is the most intensively farmed area in Canada.

Paton told National Post that farming in the area has already been disrupted by the recent Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to nearby Burnaby, B.C.

“The process of running pipe through is very disruptive to whoever’s farming and sets food production back by at least a full year,” said Paton.

He said that food growers in the area are just getting back to their normal rhythms.

Harman Bhangu, the Conservative MLA for nearby Langley-Abbotsford, said he’s received a few anxious emails from farmers in his riding about the proposed pipeline. Bhangu said they didn’t fully oppose the pipeline but didn’t trust the government to manage the publicly owned project.

Paton added that putting the terminus in Delta would mean building a new 260-hectare marine terminal on valuable farmland. This would include a massive new oil storage facility capable of holding 6.5 million barrels of oil.

“We’d be talking about, like, 15 of these massive white storage tanks somewhere on farmland, right on the edge of the ocean,” he said.

Paton said he was disappointed that the pipeline debate was dominated by concerns about sensitive ecosystems and marine life in northern B.C. but barely touched on his region’s food growing capacity.

Delta city councillor and mayoral candidate Dylan Kruger said he shares Paton’s concerns about local farmland but was willing to wait and see what benefits the pipeline proposal would bring the community.

“Farming is always going to be the core of who we are as a community but, at the same time, if the powers that be at the provincial and federal tables decide that this is the route, all we can do is work with higher levels of government,” said Kruger.

“We’re not the decision makers in Delta… but we can sit down with the decision makers and ask how we can make this the safest and best project with the most benefits to the community,” he said.

National Post rmohamed@postmedia.com